Catherine "Trina" McLean Jacobsen

My mother was born in Denver Colorado on April 11, 1920. She was the only child of Richard C. McLean and Catherine Marie Hoffman. My grandfather worked for the Highway Department in Nevada. They lived in Wells, Nevada when she was twelve years old. I can only remember her talking about living in Wells and Fernley, Nevada.Her mother died when she was fourteen years old and her father remarried Doralee "Rowena" Brambaugh. They had two girls. Rowena Nevada McLean and Dorothy Kay McLean. My mother was pretty much on her own after her mother died. She lived in Fernley, Nevada at the time of her mother's death. She graduated High School in Fernley and went to Woodbury College in Burbank, California and studied Interior Decorating for a year. While she was at college she babysat for a couple. We have a picture of her sitting outside in the backyard with the child riding a bicycle.
I wish that I would have listened to her more carefully and wrote some of this stuff down when she was alive. She married my father on December 27, 1941 in Gardnerville, Nevada. They lived in almost every town in Nevada, as my father worked road construction. They lived in Fernley when my brother and my sister and I were born. As there was no hospital in Fernley, we were all born in Fallon, Nevada. We lived in Fernley the first five years of my life. My dad was gone and we lived in a little house in Fernley. I mean a little house. My mother had many friends there, as she had gone to school there and I think that was her only comfort.
One story I do remember is that my mother and father we living in an apartment in Reno and my mother was working. She came home one day and my father hadn't found a job and was laying on the bed. She told him that he better get out and find a job because she wasn't going to support him. I guess he realized that she meant it, because he always had a job and he could always find a job.
I have come to realize that my father was a womanizer and drank quite a bit. I don't know how my mother ever survived that other than she had three small children and she hadn't finished college, so she felt she had no way to support herself and three children.
Mom was always at home, she never worked outside the home when we were kids. When we lived in Fallon on my grandparents ranch, Mom sold Avon for awhile. When she sold Avon is when we started to have to help her clean the house. It really wasn't much but it seems like it was to us.
Mom had a very kind and loving personal. She was always saying "if we didn't have something nice to say about someone, don't say anything." She was always for the underdog. She wouldn't let us make fun of some one walking down the street. I loved that about my mother.
My mother was a very moral person. I never doubted that she was true to her beliefs or her morals. I could never understood why she put up with my father. My Father never layed a hand on my mother, but he did verbally abuse her. He was always putting her down and didn't listen to anything she had to say. It was always his way or no way. I often think of the life my mother had to live with my father and wonder how she turned out so good and kind. She had a very unhappy marriage and I think a very lonely and unhappy childhood. It amazes me that she turned out to be the person that she was. As I grow older I think of her and wish that she could have had the life that I have enjoyed. One thing that my mother did was love her children and taught them good sound principles. I don't think that we ever disappointed her, at least I hope and pray we didn't.